Moving files for Metallica

Never ones for the understated gesture, Metallica’s latest concert film Metallica: Into the Never fuses a slightly surreal plot involving a roadie with more conventional – and arguably more thrilling – concert footage, all wrapped up in a 3D IMAX presentation. Signiant’s Media Shuttle was apparently instrumental in lobbing the resultant huge files around

“Working in 3D, we need to be able to move massive files – at times upwards to 200-300 GB in a single transfer – and do so quickly,” comments Todd Cogan, SVP of Operations at LA-based production company Venture 3D.

It’s an increasing problem for production and one that’s only going to get both worse and more widespread as the industry moves into working in higher resolutions and in turn they become more commonly used. Signiant makes a powerful case for its hybrid cloud system being the way forward, and certainly that combination of being able to choose where the assets are securely held (i.e. firmly on your own premises and behind your own firewalls) and hosting the upload access and UI in the cloud seems to be popular with Venture 3D and others.

“With other solutions we face limitations on the size of the files we can transfer and the number of users that can collaborate on a project,” continues Cogan, opening up another facet of the debate. “Media Shuttle is our ‘go to’ file transfer solution and we regularly use it for our most time sensitive and top priority projects, like the Metallica movie. It is flexible, extremely intuitive, lets us easily manage users, and work from multiple locations; and it does not inhibit our workflow in any way.”

Venture 3D has worked on Titanic 3D, The Green Hornet and Red Bull Media’s The Art of Flight amongst others, so Cogan knows what he’s talking about. And by all accounts, though the narrative sequences are perhaps a bit of a challenge, the concert parts of Into the Never are as good as anything’s the band has committed to film in its long and illustrious career. Certainly it’s all a bit more of a success that its last creative project, a collaboration with Lou Reed called Lulu which is, frankly, everything you might imagine it to be.